Heather Treseler is a poet, essayist, and literary scholar. She contributed essays and reviews on poetry and literary topics to The Weekly Standard between 2015 and 2017, exploring themes of poetic form, place, and tradition.
The sonnet is an architectural fixture as germane to Western thought as the flying buttress, and one nearly as old. Poems of 14 lines, metered and rhymed, came into vogue in 13th-century Tuscany and never quite left the scene. Indeed, sonnets and flowing robes are about the only things in common…
Seamus Heaney responds to Virgil’s call.
‘I envy the mind hiding in her words,” Mary McCarthy opined of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), a poet admired for her air of secrecy during the heyday of confessionalism, when poets regularly hauled their Freudian couches into the amphitheater. Bishop’s poems, in contrast, invoke textured scenes and…